A series of concluding ironies arises from this peculiarity of cultural history, final complications in the three men's shifting relation to the economics of authorship. Outsold by the more popular women while they were alive, the canonical novelists turned out to have greater staying power in the marketplace after their deaths. They owed their posthumous success not to the triumph of laissez faire but rather to the support of the emergent literary establishment. Whether or not their works possess greater artistic value, what raised Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville above their compatriots was the intervention on their behalf of fellow male professionals — the publishers, critics, and teachers who overruled the market by reprinting their books, -70- promoting their reputations, and assigning them in courses. The novelists who created the aesthetic as a discrete entity, a literary realm parallel to Smith's self-righting economy, achieved immortality through a form of cultural subvention or "welfare." The visible hand of professional authority was needed to rescue the self-sufficient novel from popular disfavor and to convert antebellum remainders into the enduring best-sellers of American literature.
Michael T. Gilmore
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The Romance
Perhaps no literary term has been more descried, analyzed, and debated during recent decades than the term "Romance." Such eminent critics of American literature as Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase have identified its characteristics, contrasted them with those of the novel, and offered a beguiling paradigm focusing our attention on the achievement of Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and (especially) Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. But consensus has not rested easy: although such studies as those of Joel Porte and Richard Brodhead refined our sense of romance elements in specific texts, David H. Hirsch and Nicolaus Mills — among others — have balked at the idea of an autonomous genre called the romance and at what seemed to them fuzzy distinctions between narrative forms. Aware of the confusion wrought by evolving perspectives and critical fashions, Michael Davitt Bell has surveyed "the development of American Romance" with perceptive authority as a way of coming to see what happens in narrative when the romance sacrifices (as it does) relation to the quotidian world. And such recent assessments of American fiction as those of Edgar A. Dryden, Robert Levine, and Steven C. Sheer have inquired into the provenance and function of the romance with a fresh sense of purpose. On one thing most parties would agree: the persistent dialogue over the nature of the romance suggests its vital, albeit elusive and ambiguous, importance.
By common consent, the crucial text for discussing the nature of -72- the romance in American fiction comes from the preface to Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851). "When a writer calls his work a Romance," Hawthorne writes, "it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel." The novel, he goes on to say, "is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course" of human experience; the romance, while it must adhere to the truth of the human heart, offers a greater freedom of presentation: the writer may manage the "atmospherical medium" so as to "bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture." The writer of romance, that is, has the latitude to adjust or refract reality, to fashion what we might call a subjunctive world of fiction different in kind from the socially structured world in which we live but implicated, I would add, in its desires and fears.
Hawthorne was not alone in making such a distinction between the romance and the novel. Nor was the distinction invented by American writers. Both William Congreve and the gothic storyteller Clara Reeve characterized the romance as dealing with the wondrous and unusual and the novel as depicting events of a familiar nature, Congreve in the preface to his otherwise-forgotten Incognita (1692), Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1795). In a preface to the revised edition of The Yemassee (1853), Hawthorne's Southern contemporary William Gilmore Simms made an elaborate case for the romance as the modern substitute for the epic. Important for Simms, as for Hawthorne, is the fact that the romance allows an extravagance of presentation: rather than subjecting "itself to what is known, or even what is probable, it grasps at the possible."
Despite the tendency of some nineteenth-century reviewers to use the terms romance and novel interchangeably (as Nina Baym demonstrates in her study of reviews and readers), Hawthorne could and did assume an established distinction between the two kinds of fiction in his preface to Seven Gables. Later descriptions of the romance as an identifiable kind of narrative support the idea of breaking away from the commonplace as a fundamental characteristic. Having already declared his affinity for the romance in Mardi (1849), Melville came to think of fiction itself as expansive, replete with wonder: "It -73- is with fiction as with religion," he wrote in The Confidence-Man (1857); "it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie." The metaphor of a "tie" brings to mind Henry James's well-known analogy of "the balloon of experience" in his preface to the New York edition of The American (1909). The balloon, according to James, carries us into a world of imagination; but it is tethered to the earth by "a rope of remarkable length" that locates us and assures us where we are. If the rope is cut, "we are at large and unrelated." Ever concerned with technique, James concludes that "the art of the romancer" is to cut the cable undetected, with "insidious" craft. James's balloon analogy has long been a favorite among students of the romance. But his preface to The American offers an equally provocative and even more precise description of the form. James explicitly disavows the popular idea of the strange and the far as crucial aspects of the romance; they simply represent the unknown, which the increasing range of our experience may convert to the known. Nor is a romantic temperament in a character basic to this kind of narrative (while Emma Bovary is a romantic, "nothing less resembles a romance" than Flaubert's Madame Bovary). The romance, he goes on to say, explores a reality that "we never can directly know," no matter our resolve. It "deals" with a special kind of experience — and here we come to the essence of James's definition — "experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it" by way of social context.
What emerges from this assemblage of definitions is a sense of the romance as an enabling theory of narrative equipped with memorable and facilitating metaphors. What comes from the theory is a mode of fiction that presents extravagance and courts the "disengaged" (in James's term), a fiction of intensity that feeds on caricature and seeks to confront the absolute. The consequence is a diverse set of narratives, gothic, magical, and psychological (frequently tending toward the allegorical and symbolic), unparalleled as expressive vehicles of revenge. In the work of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, one finds achievement of high and diverse order but none more eloquent than in studies of revenge empowered by the narrative energies of romance. -74-
Throughout his twenty years of writing tales before the publication of The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne worked tentatively and at times clumsily to release the imagination for the purposes of his art. He spent a career finding ways to enter what he once called "the kingdom of possibilities." In the context of a society suspicious of imaginative indulgence, his commitment to the imagination was cautious, even intermittent: what he called "the hot, hard practical life of America" never ceased to threaten his creative efforts. Out of his difficulties he wrote a number of tales dramatizing the plight of the imagination in a hostile environment — among them, "The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844), and "The Snow-Image" (1850) — and developed strategies of shaping and presentation that did much to define the nature of the romance as he saw it. (It may be well to note that although the tale is not simply a short form of the romance, any more than the short story is an abbreviated form of the novel, it does deal with the kind of expansive reality typically found in the romance. In his tales as in his romances, Hawthorne worked to set the reader apart from what he continually called the "actual" world.)